Friday, January 17, 2014

School Shooting in a Philadelphia Gym - Children Shooting Children

Children have no Constitutional second amendment rights to own guns. Nevertheless, children's shootings at schools, ie, "children shooting children" are becoming alarmingly more frequent. Incredulously, children are killing children. Children should have zero access to guns. Every injury and death caused by school shootings are entirely preventable.This Friday evening, CNN reports yet another shooting. This time it's in a Philadelphia school gym. Two students were shot by peer who came at them with a gun and fired. Both victims appeared to have been struck once inside the gym of Delaware Valley Charter High School. Police followed up on a tweet around 5:45 p.m. saying they were "still looking for additional suspects."These kids homicides are linked as copy cat incidents but they're occurring with deadly regularity. In fact, a study of children's injuries by a team of public health researchers reports how gun violence shows up in childhood morbidity data.Dr. Angela Sauaia and her colleagues at the University of Colorado's Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora reported:

"When we started coding the trauma data, which includes all types of childhood injuries that turn up at these trauma centers, and we noticed the morbid pattern of gun violence-related injuries for children ... that shifted the focus of the study to document violence related to injuries involving gunshots." The data showed a surprising number of children are seriously injured by guns.

The bottom line, said Sauaia: "No matter what side you are on in the gun debate, I've never met a person that believes kids should have easy access to guns," Sauaia said. "The data clearly shows this is a real public health concern for children."

The epidemic of preventable gun violence incidents are injuring and killing children. Following the tragic 1999 Columbine Colorado shootings, the frequency of "children shooting children" deaths are accelerating.

This doesn't have to happen. Innocent children should not worry about their safety when they attend school or go to the gym. This wave of violence is harming our nation's educational system.

Gun violence must stop. In fact, it's preventable if children are prevented from having any access to guns.

Holding adults responsible for the deaths resulting from "children shooting children" should wake people up to this growing public health mortality. Americans have the power to stop the killing of innocent children who are being irrevocably harmed by other children. Our Second Amendment rights gun culture was absolutely never intended to harm children. But it does.

Americans must change this culture of gun violence. It's harming our international reputation, causing preventable mortality of innocent people and killing our children. All preventable.

Is there something in the law about people who somehow don't prevent crimes being implicit in the perpetrating of the injustice? I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me a culture that won't prevent gun violence is responsible for every death caused by it.